Yu Segwon came out of the room where Cha Inhu was and slowly descended the stairs.
The wooden steps groaned faintly under his weight. Under normal circumstances, no one would have paid the sound any mind, but right now, even that small friction of noise felt unbearably loud.
The gazes of the two people in the living room downstairs snapped to him simultaneously.
Park Taehan. And Seo Yungyeom.
Neither of them said a word, but their eyes alone were enough. Every question, every reproach — all of it was contained within that silence.
Park Taehan’s gaze in particular did not miss what Yu Segwon was carrying in his hands. A folded bed blanket.
Park Taehan shot to his feet. The legs of the chair scraped against the floor, but he didn’t care. He closed the distance to Yu Segwon in just a few strides.
“Did he… cough up blood again?!”
The words came out louder than he’d intended. Even Park Taehan seemed startled by himself — he swallowed once. But his gaze didn’t waver.
Yu Segwon looked at him for a moment, then gave a short shake of his head.
“No.”
Just two syllables.
At that, Park Taehan’s shoulders visibly dropped. A rough exhale slipped out of him — an ambiguous breath that carried both relief and unease at once.
Only then did Seo Yungyeom step closer. His gaze was directed not at the blanket, but at Yu Segwon’s face.
“…Then why the blanket?”
Yu Segwon was quiet for a moment. He set the blanket down on the stair railing and absently brushed the lingering warmth from his palms.
“His hands… seem to have lost their strength. He dropped a cup.”
The moment Yu Segwon finished speaking, a brief silence settled over the room.
In that short gap, Park Taehan’s face was the first to go rigid. The tension in his jaw was sharp enough that you could almost hear the way he bit down hard on his lip. He drew a breath as if swallowing something down, but in the end, he couldn’t say a single word.
Seo Yungyeom, unlike him, couldn’t hold it together.
He simply sank down into a chair. Without even thinking to lean back against it, he buried his face in both hands. Beneath his palms, his shoulders trembled in small, fine shudders. With every breath he drew in, that trembling grew a little worse.
The one crushed beneath the greatest weight of guilt in this room was Seo Yungyeom.
And that was only natural. Seo Yungyeom — one of only five S-rank Healers in all of South Korea, no, in the entire world.
Of all the people he had fought alongside to save the world, the one Seo Yungyeom had spent the most time with was none other than Cha Inhu. After every battle, he was the first to stand before him, scraping together whatever mana he had left, doing his best to ease his pain.
Wounds with bone exposed, bodies soaked in blood — he had grabbed hold of him time and again and brought him back. When he had reattached Cha Inhu’s arm after it had been severed not once, but twice, Seo Yungyeom had felt satisfaction and relief in his own ability.
“It’s my fault….”
He had always believed Cha Inhu’s words.
— I’m fine.
That one phrase, without a single shred of doubt.
If only he had scanned him properly with his mana — just once, even just once. If he had run a check even when there were no injuries, even just one time in passing.
He would surely have noticed — the organs that had already surpassed their limit, the quiet, crumbling signals of a body that could no longer hold on.
“I had no idea. About any of it.”
Seo Yungyeom’s voice was barely more than breath. The words, dropped low, stayed exactly where they fell in the room and didn’t move.
Park Taehan and Yu Segwon’s gazes shifted to Seo Yungyeom at the same time. But neither of them offered words of comfort. Saying it’s okay, or it’s not your fault — none of that fit this moment.
Park Taehan ground his teeth. Inside, he agreed with what Seo Yungyeom had murmured.
Even so, he didn’t open his mouth. Because he knew, better than anyone, that he had no right to reproach Seo Yungyeom.
Whether in battle, at rest, or in the meaningless stretches of everyday life — the one who had always been closest to Cha Inhu was Park Taehan.
“…….”
Clap. A dry, sharp sound as palms came together. In an instant, the air in the room reset. Gazes gathered naturally to a single point.
Yu Segwon. He looked at Park Taehan and Seo Yungyeom in turn. No emotion showed on his face, but his eyes were unmistakable. He opened his mouth and cut through the situation without a tremor.
“Deal with your guilt on your own time.”
It was a short, firm statement. Yu Segwon took a breath, then continued in a lower voice.
“What matters right now is finding a way to cure Sensei.”
Those words drove themselves clearly into every mind in the room.
Ding. The jarring notification tone rang out once more.
Service Quest (2) — S-Ranks, United as One
Service Quest (2) has been cleared!
I stared blankly at the quest window.
Before I could even process the meaning, the sentence floating right in the center of my vision had already embedded itself there. Even when I blinked, even when I turned my head slightly, the blue window didn’t disappear.
Slowly, very carefully, I reached out my hand. My trembling fingertips cut through the air toward the quest window. I didn’t expect to touch it. Even so, I felt like I had to check.
Sure enough, nothing was there. My hand simply passed through empty air.
At that moment, the text that still hadn’t disappeared caught my eye again at the edge of my vision.
Service Quest (1) — Securing a Safe Location
Service Quest (1) has been cleared!
The first clear notification I still hadn’t closed.
I stared blankly at those two lines for a moment, looking back and forth between them. I shook my head as if asking myself — could I be getting confused? Was I having some kind of fatigue-induced hallucination? Was my mind still not back to normal?
No matter how hard I tried to look away from reality, the quest window refused to budge.
I hadn’t done anything. I really, truly hadn’t done anything.
And yet two quests had been cleared. Under ordinary circumstances, that made absolutely no sense. There had been no conditions met, no process followed, no choice made. All I had done was breathe.
Only then did I feel something lurch and drop somewhere deep inside my chest. A sensation close to pure fear — the kind you feel when standing before something you simply cannot understand.
I grabbed fistfuls of my own hair in both hands and pulled hard, like I was trying to tear it out.
“Why…?”
Service Quests were clearly supposed to be optional. That was what it said.
Then shouldn’t there at least be something like a cancel button? Shouldn’t I have the right to refuse?
The moment that thought crossed my mind, the exact same frustration I’d harbored twelve years ago resurfaced. When I had first fallen into this world, looking at the quest window — the thought I had turned over in my head dozens of times.
I carefully gestured into the air.
This time, it wasn’t to touch the quest window. I just wanted to check. That was all — just wanted to see it properly one more time, with clear eyes.
The text I thought had disappeared rose back up, as if it had been waiting.
Cure the illness and complete the novel ‘□□□□□□□□’.
Reward: Life in the current world.
In that instant, my breath caught.
The reward for the main quest had always been clear. Resurrection in the original world. Go back. Leave this world. Leave behind Cha Inhu’s body, this name, these relationships — all of it.
But the reward for the Service Quest was the exact opposite. Life in the current world.
I stared at that sentence in silence. Each individual word settled into my chest with a weight heavier than I’d expected.
If… I receive this reward, what happens to me?
The system window had clearly said Service Quests were optional. But it had never — not even once — said that the reward was optional too.
That realization seized me by the back of the neck, belatedly.
No way….
Even as I told myself it was impossible, my thoughts wouldn’t stop.
Come on, there’s no way….
I tried to laugh it off, but my heart refused to keep up. One particular hypothesis was taking shape far too clearly inside my head.
If… the illness gets cured just like this?
Then would I have to stay in this world?
The moment that thought surfaced, a chill ran down my spine. I had lived for twelve years with the goal of returning to my original world. That single goal was what I had survived on — and the fact that all of it could disappear this easily felt like something out of a lie.
My mind went blank.
That was when it happened.
Service Quest (3) — Consume an S-Rank Potion
Reality wasn’t going to wait for me this time either. The third quest notification struck my eardrums again, as if to hurry me along.
I stared at the text for a moment, then let out a short exhale.
“Ah.”
A sigh of relief escaped my lips.
This quest was clearly different. It was something no one else could resolve in my place — a quest that couldn’t be auto-cleared by someone else’s choices.
“Ha….”
Something that had been lodged in my chest loosened, just a little. A laugh that seemed to mean nothing followed.
“Haha….”
Thank goodness.
That was the only thought that came.
I scrubbed my face with my dry hands. The rough motion swept across my skin and left a raw, chafed sensation behind, but I didn’t care about that either. I had no room right now to mind something so trivial.
A long sigh exhaled itself from deep inside my lungs.
S-rank Potions had long since run dry. We’d poured out everything we had in the final war against the monsters. The dungeon that had been able to produce those potions was also gone. There was no longer any way to gather the materials, no way to brew them again.
“Right… it can’t be that easy.”
Main quests took anywhere from a week at the shortest to a full year at the longest. S-Ranks, United as One — which had just been cleared — had once been a main quest itself, and back then, it had taken a solid year to clear.
Why that had now been accomplished in an instant was something I had neither the means to understand nor the energy to try, so I simply fell face-first onto the bed.
My body was heavy enough that it wouldn’t have been strange to fall asleep just like that.
I don’t know how much time passed. My consciousness was half-submerged when a knock-knock came from beyond the door.
I just barely managed to lift my head at the regular sound.
“Come in.”
With permission granted, the door opened carefully. The one who stepped into the room was Seo Yungyeom. On the tray he was carrying sat a bowl of warm porridge and a small potion bottle glowing with a strangely red light.
As the light hit it, the liquid inside the bottle shifted ever so slightly. It was an ambiguous color — somewhere between blood and wine.
“……?”
Why is that here.
I was swamped with confusion.
